If you own a local business or working on local business, you must be wondering what best you can do to optimize your business’s online presence locally?

You also may have many questions around local SEO, such as is local SEO different than standard SEO? Or what specific tactics one can do differently for a local business to rank it in your local area?

Whether you are new to SEO or already know things around SEO, this post will help you to understand, what exactly you need to do to rank your business on Google Map Pack and your website to show up in your local area on the first page of Google.

So, let’s get to the topic and start with the most basic thing first.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO, as the name suggests, helps boost the visibility of your business LOCALLY. Local SEO tactics are aimed to get a website to appear on search results when people are looking for your targeted keywords in your local area.

Local area includes the searches within the local geo qualifiers, such as zip code, suburbs, city and in ‘near me’ searches. When a person searches for something online, Google picks up the location of the person and shows the result from the surrounding area.

So, if you are providing signals to Google that your business exists in a specific area, Google shows your business in your area. Thus, the process of creating and enhancing online signs of the existence of your business or optimizing your business’s online presence for the local search.

How Does Local SEO Work?

Before we go on to understand how to optimize your website for local SEO, let us first have a basic understanding of how does Google rank the search results?

Google considers hundreds of factors to rank hundreds and thousands of sites to rank in much less than a second! This process is called an algorithm. When someone types a term in the Google search bar, the algorithm returns the list of web pages that matches with what you searched for from its index. However, this list of sites is not randomly organized, in fact, the web pages are ranked based on various factors, such as relevance, prominence, on-page optimizations and quality of links pointing to your website.

All of the qualifying sites are added to the list and then ranked based on relevancy and authority. Authority refers to the quantity and quality of links pointing to your website. Relevancy is determined based on which web page answers the search query in the best way. Then most qualifying sites are listed at the top of the search result page.

Improving both, relevancy and authority of your website along with enhancing the right digital footprint will rank your website higher in local search results as well as in local map pack.

What Are Local SEO benefits?

If you are a local brick-and-mortar store, optimizing your website for local search is not only extremely rewarding but critical for the growth of your business. Let us look at some obvious benefits of local SEO.

Most people pick up their smartphone whenever they need to find something nearby, be it looking for a coffee shop or a dentist. If your business is optimized for local SEO, there are good chances that people will come across your website online and become your customers.

Local SEO will help your customers get the information when they need it. For example, your phone number, direction to your premises, whether your store provides free Wi-Fi, what are opening hours or any other attraction that you want your customers to know about your business.

Even if you do not have a website, you can still appear in local searches through map pack and draw more customers to your business.

Through a local map listing, you can provide a lot more information to your customers to win their trust in your business. You could let them know what offers you are running, description of your business, prices of your products, let them book an appointment, receive calls and much more. This, in turn, will enhance familiarity with your company which tend to attract more customers.

It is needless to say that if your website is not optimized for local SEO, your business becomes out of sight, out of mind for your customers. And your business will miss opportunities to appear in front of many customers, searching for your products or services.

Local SEO checklist

1. Optimize your Google My Business Listing.
2. Improve the internal linking structure on your website.
3. Optimize your website on-page.
4. Add location page on your website.
5. Create content that has local intent.
6. Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly.
7. Make your NAP (Name, Address, Phone) consistent throughout your online presence.
8. Create local directories and local citations.
9. Get more relevant and authority links pointing to your website.

Now that you are familiar with what is local SEO and it works let us go on to the local SEO tactics. Below is a detailed guide on what exactly you can do to optimize your website for local search?

1. Optimize your Google My Business Listing

Google My Business listing is a primary factor to optimize your business for local search. Through Google My Business listing, you can verify your business an authentic business. Go to Google My Business, choose an appropriate category for your business and make sure that you maintain the NAP (Name, Address and Phone) consistency throughout your online presence including your website, local and business directories.

Specify as much information about your business as you can, such as business opening hours, business description, website URL, contact details, products or services that you serve etc. Also, make sure that you regularly keep adding posts on your Google My Business page. It would be hugely rewarding if you could gather reviews from your customers for your local listing.

2. Improve the internal linking structure on your website

While it is true that external links contribute significantly to the authority of your website, internal linking also play a significant role in boosting your SEO rankings.

Internal linking is vital for the following reasons:

a) They dictate website navigation.

b) The internal linking structure forms architecture and establishes the hierarchy of your web pages.

c) With correct internal linking, you can distribute page authority and ranking power throughout your website.

3. Optimize your website on-page

Every time you add a new page, make sure you do thorough keyword research. Find out what search terms your customers are using while searching your business? Shortlist the keywords that are highly sought but give preference to the terms that have medium or low competition over the keywords with high competition for faster results.

Once you have final keywords, map your keywords to your pages. Meaning, you need to keep the keywords around the same theme on a page and create a separate page for different themed keywords. For example, if you are talking about ‘dog food’ on a page, then use keywords around dog food on the page. If you want to use dog training or dog grooming related keywords, it is better to create separate pages for those keywords for better results.

Make sure that you use your primary keyword in the title tag, headings tags and the meta description. Also, use the similarly themed keywords in the body of content where appropriate.

Remember to link to other relevant pages on your website with appropriate anchor-text. This enhances user experience as well as make your website crawl-friendly for search engine bots.

4. Add location page on your website.

If you serve at more than one location; it is recommended that you create location pages dedicated to specific locations.

Location pages help you provide location-specific information, such as phone number, store directions, unique store description, parking information, promotions and promotions for your customers.

Location dedicated pages also convey search engine the information about different location in details. Be careful that you do not create duplicate content, as most businesses tend to have similar content on all location pages. This can prove detrimental to SEO. You could provide a unique store description, explain how to reach to store with the store specific information. This will help you create exclusive content for each location page.

5. Create content that has local intent

Google is continuously evolving and has come far from its older days. This means that writers do not need to write a bit differently to make it search engine bots friendly. Nowadays, content writers can write keeping their human users in mind, and it will still be search engine friendly.

When writing content to optimize locally, use more of the local dialect, use the terms that users use in your location for your product or services. You could consider using more of long-tail phrases instead of one to two words keywords. In the content, use names of the suburbs the city your company operates in.

You could mention famous landmarks around your business for a direction that people in your area generally use. To make it more effective, use the name of the location in the URL of the page.

6. Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly

Most of the local searches are going on smartphones. Hence, your website needs to be mobile-friendly. The website should load fast, and it is easy to navigate. Phone number is specified clearly and easily visible and provide maps to provide direction to your store.

Google favours the site that is mobile friendly and loads fast.

7. Make your NAP (Name, Address, Phone) consistent throughout your online presence.

To make it easy for search engines to understand your contact details, use HTML to specify your contact details. Do not use image format to show the NAP details. Using HTML makes it crawlable and search engine friendly, the bots do not read images.

Keep the text of address consistent, for example, if you write ‘street’ or ‘St’ to specify a street name, keep one way of writing the address consistently. Same goes for complete contact details; you need to keep the contact details consistent on your website, Google My Business Listing, online business directories, local directories etc.

Inconsistencies like different spellings, abbreviations, missed suite number or wrong phone number can be problematic. You could verify that your citations are consistent on tools like Moz Local.

8. Create local directories and local citations.

You must list your business in the local directories and business directories in your local area. Presence in directories and citations provides the online presence of your business.

As mentioned above, consistency is critical. The difference in details can create confusion for search engines about which contact details are correct, and this, in turn, may result in your business not showing in the search results at all!

9. Get more relevant and authority links pointing to your website.

Inbound links are a powerful SEO booster. With every inbound link, your domain gets more authority, and your business gets legitimacy in the eyes of Google. Some of the ways to gain quality links are guest blogging, directory listings, social bookmarking, article submission, forum participating and image, pdf or ppt sharing.

Make sure that the website you are getting links from is relevant to your website, and has good domain authority score. Links from .edu and .gov are highly useful to enhance your website’s domain authority and boost SEO.

What more can you do to optimize your local SEO?

Share your Google My Business page on your social media to align your local search with your social media presence.

Engage with your customers on Google My Business page. Encourage your customers to leave feedback on your listings. Share your Google My Business Review link with your customers to make it easy for them to leave reviews for your business. Respond to the questions, messages and reviews on your listing page.

How long does local SEO take?

This question is asked frequently by both business owners and webmasters. The answer depends on many factors, including the current SEO status, the competitiveness of the specific industry.

According to a survey conducted by the Bright Local, If you are a brand new business and have not worked on SEO at all, depending on the competitiveness of the industry, it can take from 1 month to 9 months to see a significant increase in visibility and performance improvement.

I understand that the margin of one to nine months is vast, but there is no straight forward answer when it comes to SEO as there are many uncertain variables and hurdles to overcome.

But consistency is the key if you wish to see some tangible results. If your webmaster is consistent and prioritizing the SEO tactics correctly, you may start to see some results within three months too.

We, at Digital Masters Hub, have seen results in two months also for business in a medium competitive industry.

How much does local SEO cost?

The answer to this question depends on three things:

How many locations do you wish to optimize for?

How many products/services you want to optimize on local SEO?

How aggressive strategy you wish to implement for your business?

Depending on your requirements, local SEO services may cost from $100 to $1000 per month.

Digital agencies have different packages. But no one strategy fits all businesses. At Digital Masters Hub, we assess your online presence and the nature of your business to tailor a suitable strategy to come to costs.

If you are looking to get local SEO services for your business, or comprehensive Digital Marketing Services, chat with us and discuss your business with our SEO consultant.

+61 415526553, or send us an inquiry at contact@digitalmastershub.com.